Camping

Today I hit a wall. Although figurative in nature, it was tall and thick and painful as hell, so, as walls go, I suppose it was a pretty significant one. You see, since New Year's day I have been working intensives, which means an extra class each day, bringing my in-class teaching time to nine hours per day, my required time at work to ten hours per day, and my actual time at work or preparing for it to somewhere around eleven. Any sane person could see that the wall was there, looming, in the distance. I was just hoping it would take a bit longer to catch up to me.

Since I have come to Korea I have been able to notice when I need a break from normal life and the Korean mindset. Little things start to chip away at my generally upbeat and foreign-experience loving attitude. Petty stuff becomes increasingly annoying, like how there is a separate light for north, south, east, and west-bound traffic, making each wait at a stoplight take twice as long, or how the concept of an orderly line does not exist and being cut is a daily occurrence. Usually a day at the beach or a mountain or even another city helps restore my sanity and allows me not to become a full-out fire-breathing monster where my students' cries of "Teacher, teacher!" are the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard and the thought of explaining the meaning of 'surplus' even one more time makes me positively retch.

This caged, crazed feeling has been creeping up on me over the course of the intensives period. I have been unable to escape to the hills (or anywhere) because by the time Saturday morning rolls around I am too exhausted to do more than curl into the fetal position and twitch. It's really quite ugly. Now, I know that I really don't have it that bad; I know that many people have it much worse, are working longer hours for less pay, doing something that they utterly despise. I chose to work this extra class for just one month and I know that the light at the end of the tunnel is the big overtime paycheck at the end.

Knowing this, however, did not stop me from having strangely gratifying fantasies of baseball bats and profane music a la Office Space as I was elbow-deep in the toner-stained innards of the office copy machine yet again today. I swear, the failure alert beep will haunt my dreams for years to come. (I actually heard one co-worker chant "no whammies, no whammies, no whammies" as he inserted his test, only to have it come out in 298365475 pieces twenty minutes later) I have come to loathe the face of the copy machine repair guy because I'm pretty sure that I know how to do his job better than he does. If you ever have questions about the intricate details of a Rocio 2075 I'm definitely your girl.

At any rate, today, after hearing the failure alert beep for the seventy-sixth time, after pulling reams of shredded, unusable paper from each of twenty-nine malfunctioning locations, after toiling for fourty-four minutes with no success multiplied by the six or more weeks that the machine has been tormenting us the only thing that kept me from walking straight out of that office and into my bed for a much-needed nap is the delicious internal debate raised by Office Space. Would I be the guy from the movie who actually steals the printer, or the one who has to be pried off, bare fists still flailing, only to escape his friends' well-meaning grasp to get in a few last vindictive blows? It's not a tough call, but at this point it may be the only thing that will get me through the next eight working days.

But, hey, you know what else is intense?